Johnny Depp ‘dropped’ from Pi­rates of the Caribbean

Johnny Depp’s Pi­rates of the Caribbean run has re­port­edly come to an end. Fol­low­ing news that Dis­ney is look­ing into re­boot­ing its very own fran­chise, the orig­i­nal film’s screen­writer Stu­art Beattie ap­peared to con­firm Depp’s time as Cap­tain Jack Spar­row is over.

“I think he’s had a great run,” he told Dai­ly­mailtv. “Ob­vi­ously he’s made that char­ac­ter his own and it’s be­come the thing that he’s most fa­mous for now. It’s been great for him and it’s been great for us.”

He con­tin­ued: “There’s that say­ing, ‘Don’t frown be­cause it’s over, smile be­cause it hap­pened.’ The fact that they’re re­boot­ing some­thing that you did means that you did some­thing that was worth re­boot­ing. It’s an hon­our.” Depp has played the role in five films across 14 years which have ac­cu­mu­lated box of­fice tak­ings of over $4.5 bil­lion mak­ing it the twelfth big­gest fran­chise of all time.

Re­port­edly, the animation stu­dio — along­side pro­duc­ing pow­er­house Jerry Bruck­heimer — is tar­get­ing Deadpool writ­ers Rhett Reese and Paul Wer­nick for script du­ties of the fran­chise re­boot. The most re­cent Pi­rates film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, was re­leased in 2015 with di­rec­tor Joachim Røn­ning stat­ing it was “only the be­gin­ning of the fi­nal ad­ven­ture.”